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By Lynn, on July 22nd, 2010%
I’ve been wrestling with some chronic vision issues caused by living in a part of the country that is too bright for my Britain-based genes so I missed this nice mention of Closed Circle over at the Dear Author blog.
Their tag line includes the dreaded word “romance,” but please don’t let that stop you from delving deeply into their archives. Genre boundaries are less meaningful than ever (less ghetto, more sprawl) and the “J”s have great insights when it comes to the evolution (devolution???) of traditional publishing
By Lynn, on June 30th, 2010%
I touched up the Wooden Sword cover to make the title a bit easier to read and to add some depth to the sword’s hilt.
I’d really hoped to have the book (and its sample) up on Closed Circle by now, but life intervened: more meetings with roofers in search of a way to passively drain the swimming pools that form on top of our buildings every time it rains, a pair of Habitat for Humanity dedications that carved larger chunks out of my schedule than I’d anticipated, and a stall iPhone download of one of Jane’s books. (Usually Jane handles that sort of problem herself, but she and Carolyn had gone on a quest for mattresses and the purchaser-in-distress had been planning/hoping to have Jane’s books available for reading on a plane that was departing….oh, about five hours ago.
The good news is that I managed to send a working file her way, but I really need to write down the secret location where Jane stashes our stock!
Anyway, I’m off to Macon, GA tomorrow morning. I promised Diane before she left that I’d come visit her every fifth Wednesday…and that’s tomorrow. When we’re not conspiring and stitching with Roberta. we’ll be playing with zippers (inspired by this Etsy shop: Woolly Fabulous
By Lynn, on June 27th, 2010%
In terms of concept…it’s what I’ve always wanted.
In terms of executions…I’ve seen worse
…
By Lynn, on June 25th, 2010%
So, I’ve been gone for over a month and I come back to show you this????
Well, yes…and don’t worry if you don’t understand German., I don’t either and I didn’t feel that I missed anything important. I especially appreciated the patriotic paint jobs on the vuvuzelas.
But what actually drew me out of no-blogging mode was this…
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2010/06/24/thursday-midday-links-5/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dearauthor+%28Dear+Author%3A+Romance+Novel+Reviews%2C+Industry+News%2C+and+Commentary%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
the second section, where Jane (a different Jane) gets to the bottom of some strange pricing I’d been noticing recently while stocking my Kindle. Seems our friendly, fun-loving publishers have come up with a two-for-one strategy: doing dirt to reader and authors simultaneously by side-stepping that pesky Out-Of-Print clause that would allow us (the authors) to reclaim our backlist for republication as affordable ebooks for you (the readers). Seems that instead of letting titles go peacefully OOP, they’re going to do the heavy lifting of selling you (the readers) a print-on-demand copy!
A plague, I swear, a plague on all their houses!
Oh…and there is a memo! Which means there may be something signable soon.
And…let’s see…. I finished digitizing The Wooden Sword for Closed Circle, but I’ve come a cropper on the cover. I tried some stack art and “photoshopping” a photo or two, all to no avail, so it’s going to be just plain text. But at least I should have another book on the virtual shelf.
I’ve been traveling, too – a 2,700 mile road trip from Leesburg to Monroe, LA, to Dallas, to Norman, OK, then back to Dallas, and returning home via Lafayette, LA and Pensacola, FL. Dallas 1 was A-Kon 21: 20,000+ anime’ fans and about 250 science-fiction fans. Esther Friesner was among the guests. We hadn’t seen each other in at least twenty-five years, so there was quite a bit of catching up to do. Peter Beagle was there, too, and, for all the years between us, our paths had never crossed, which made the post-con Sunday-night expedition to Kobe Steakhouse a night to remember. (It turns out that Peter’s joined forces with someone else I knew “back then” – Freff, who also answers to Connor Cochran these days.
Dallas 2 was Stitching Safari – an embroidery seminar where I began my versions of these two pieces Harebells (I’m doing mine in red and copper on green velvet) and Dragon in the Round.
It was a long trip, but renewing and mind-clearing in the way that only long-distance solo driving can be, at least for me.
By Lynn, on April 14th, 2010%
As expected, I took the Kindle to bed Monday night, all loaded up with intriguing samples, and quickly discovered that, as a reader, I really like being able to sample a couple thousand words before I purchase a book but, as an author, sampling is a major challenge.
As I see it, since I send my samples to Kaos from Firefox on my desktop, when I start reading, I don’t have a cover (and I don’t remember the cover graphic from Firefox) or cover blurbs to prime me for the experience. It’s unadulterated narrative text from the git-go, which is to say that Crime and Punishment starts off with no advantage over The Eye of Argon.. In a way it’s like those entrapments where a critically renown author sends his editor/agent a manuscript under a pseudonym and it gets spectacularly rejected: Kindle removes the emperor’s clothing and the text stands naked. (Because, I wouldn’t sample, say, CJ’s Deceiver; I’d simply purchase it.)
My first sample was Soulless,, by Gail Carriger – because there’s a great YouTube video on how the cover for Blameless, the third book in the series, was created—
(As one who is already contemplating a new cover for the Closed Circle edition of The Wooden Sword , I confess I’m completely intimidated.)
Anyway, without giving too much away, the prose didn’t quite sparkle, at least not in comparison with the last pseudo-Victorian I’d read (and thoroughly enjoyed), Deanna Raybourn’s Silent in the Grave, moreover the sample came to an abrupt end in the middle of a scene. I was under the opinion (that’s you, Elaine) that samples were usually the first chapter, but in this case, I suspect the sample was simply a fixed number of words, set by the publisher rather than the author (I can’t imagine that Carriger would have sliced her story 3/4’s of the way through chapter one). The net result was that I very nearly didn’t purchase the book; I wouldn’t have purchased it if it weren’t for the YouTube video.
The sample would have killed the sale.
Now, this is great for me as a reader, saving me money and all, but, WOW, does it clue me in to the importance of the samples for Closed Circle! (Kaos has now completely justified itself as a business expense.) The samples have to do the job of the cover, the blurbs, and the hook…and they have to do it in plain text. In the beginning, Gordie told me to put a hook at the top of chapter one and have all the thematic elements in place by the end of chapter three. The Kindle sample is more than the top of the first chapter, much less than three chapters. Should I enlarge the Closed Circle samples, given that the books are already written? Should I amend my structural strategies? Should the samples include more than verbatim text from the novel? If anyone has any thoughts/suggestions/opinions, I’d love to collect them.
Other than that, the first night reading experience was just fine.
But discovering the perils of samples wasn’t my only Kindle adventure…
I took Kaos to the monthly meeting of my Embroiderers’ Guild of America chapter last night and it should come as no surprise that it drew the sort of attention usually given to pictures of cute puppies and brand-new grandchildren. The font-enlargement feature was particularly appreciated. The ladies held it reverently, because as embroiderers’ they know better than to fondle objects of desire. (They wanted to know how it got its books and the best answer I came up with was to say it was a cell phone that could only call Amazon’s number). I saw want in their eyes.
After the meeting, I visited with a close EGA friend who’s moving to Georgia at the end of the month. She’s an IBM retiree and was thoroughly geeked. She’s probably ordered her K2i by now, although she knows that she really needs two devices, one for her and one for her mother….the only question being whether they can make do with one K2i until the K3 arrives, whenever it arrives.
So, I have successfully spread the contagion.
I got a lovely sleeve for Kaos, but, honestly, I don’t know why no one’s made a sleeve based on this
By Lynn, on February 4th, 2010%
The kerfluffle has gone another round. John Sargent, CEO at Macmillan, has penned an open letter to Macmillan authors and illustrators, with a CC to literary agents.
Already I’m confused. All agents? Just those agents with clients at Macmillan? There is a difference. But, since I’m definitely a Macmillan author, whose Amazon buttons have yet to reappear, I kept reading…
Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced. In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.
About that “we,” Mr. Sargent…. Exactly who are the “we” who’ve been deeply concerned, who’ve moved from a standing start to a new business model in just three weeks!? I assumed, through the first four sentences, that “we” was “you”—corporate Macmillan—rather than “us”—because why else would you be sending me a letter.
Then I hit the fifth sentence: …”our intellectual property”…
I checked, just to make certain, but there it is on the title page verso – copyright 2006 / Lynn Abbey. Rifkind’s Challenge is MY intellectual property. It is licensed to Macmillan/TOR under a contract that sometimes feels like indentured servitude (or maybe like the old Hollywood studio/contract system). License is not quite the same as ownership.
But, by golly, they’re going to be fair to “those who create.”
These are the good guys?
Is it any wonder I’m confused…and just a teeny bit skeptical?
Back in the Dark Ages—the mid 70s, the post Star-Wars period when Hollywood started optioning SF—the wise words were: Get all your money up front; and if that doesn’t work never, ever take a share of net anything, especially profits.
So, now I’m back to thinking about that Wall Street Journal article I linked to few days back. Macmillan’s got the same problem…a problem they can partially solve by sweetening current/future contracts and then offering to sprinkle the same sweetner on old contracts…all in the name of fairness….toward the creators of their intellectual property.
Yeah, there are going to be problems. Somebody’s going to have to come up with the publishing equivalent of United Artists. UA didn’t change the game because they won an anti-trust suit against the system; they did it by beating the system at its own game
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What I'm working on these days
Exiled on Main St.
Short Story
Status: Active
Word count: 5500
as of: 7-12-2010
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Look Who’s Talking…